Abstract
As the numbers of migrant populations and LGBT migrants and asylum seekers rise around the globe, Pathways of Desire is a welcome research that sheds light on sexualities and cross-racial sexual attractions among gay Mexican men who reside in San Diego, United States. Indeed, the central theme of the book is investigating what Carrillo has termed as “sexual migration” (p. 4) or the migratory flows that are primarily informed by migrants’ sexualities. Sexual migration is related to family, economy, and social issues. Carrillo outlines three main goals for Pathways of Desire: examine the role of sexuality in transnational relocation of gay men (p. 5); underline the importance of sexuality for migration studies (p. 6); and draw on gay Mexican men’s agencies in shaping social relations with US-born gay men to challenge assumptions that sexual discourses are unidirectionally circulated from the West to the Global South (p. 7). Pathways of Desire also contributes to the literature on the sexual health of sexual minority immigrants.
The book is divided into ten main chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion chapters. The research data for this sociological study was gathered in San Diego between 2003 and 2005 and through a total of 265 interviews with gay Mexican men as well as US-born Latino and White gay men. The book is also the first sociological study in the fields of migration and sexualities to explore gay migrants’ pre-migration lives and to follow their stories through and after migration. Pathways of Desire is informed by symbolic interactionism, Bourdieusian approach, and Gagnon and Simon’s concept of sexual scripts.
In chapter 1, Carrillo lays out the conceptual framework of sexual migration, and argues that interpersonal and sexual relations are informed by power inequalities between individuals and nations. Carrillo, briefly drawing on the post-colonial literature, argues that histories of colonialism play a central role in shaping such sexual relations and that “the awareness of power brought about by colonial framework facilitates an analysis of the unequal” (p. 33) relations between gay Mexican men and US-born gay men of different ethnic backgrounds. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 discuss the diversities in sexualities and sexual cultures in Mexico to challenge the black-and-white image of Mexico as exclusively traditional and the US as liberal. Carrillo relies on gay Mexican men’s narratives and his own observations throughout these chapters. In chapters 5 and 6, in line with network theory in migration studies, he demonstrates the ways that previous migration patterns and current immigrant networks in the U.S. inform and facilitate legal and illegal relocation of gay Mexican men to San Diego. All of these chapters contain exciting narratives that reflect gay Mexican men’s image of life in the U.S., their social relations in the U.S., and the changes in their sexualities and sexual behaviors.
Chapters 8 and 9 discuss the shifts in sexualities and the dynamics and discourses of cross-racial sexual attractions. In a subsection on “The Patterns of Attraction among Mexican Gay Immigrants”, Carrillo relies on quotations such as, “I love blonds, gueros, with blue eyes” (p 189) and “attracted to a stereotypical ‘Brad Pitt type’” (p. 191) to argue that gay Mexican men’s attraction to White gay men is largely informed by racial attitudes as one participant also “discussed the prevailing racial attitudes in his family and his region, where people constantly emphasized whiteness as a standard of beauty” (p. 194). In chapter 10, Carrillo strengthens his discussions by dissecting the ways that power inequalities in sexual and social relations of gay Mexican men are informed by “financial disparities” (p .237), ”threat of deportation” (p. 239), and the “perils of mixing power play with racialization” (p. 241).
However, Carrillo does not use this race-based lens to explore the cases in which Mexican men express their attractions to Mexican-Indians (p. 196) other Latinos, and African Americans (p. 210), all of whom are of lower racial status. While White gay men’s perception of Latino gay men is explained as exoticizing and as a remnant of colonial power relations, gay Mexican men’s portrayal of White men is explained as stereotyping rather than another way of exoticizing the gueros. These analytical disparities compel me to ask whether gay Mexican men’s perceptions of White gay men could also be explained through class differences rather racial hierarchies.
In sum, Carrillo’s project and his findings make essential contributions to the fields of migration and sexuality studies in addition to the Latino/Latina studies. Pathways of Desire targets the academic audience and confirms the necessity of bringing sexualities to the center of analyses to not only better understand the migration and integration processes, but also to develop the best strategies to address community sustainability and health issues as emphasized by Carrillo in his concluding remarks.